Pack it up, pack it in..

This week has been monumentally crap and so my training took a bit of a hit. A truly rubbish day at work on Tuesday meant that I had to scrub the commute rides for the rest of the week in favour of lugging work stuff to and fro, which with the best will in the world is hard to do, even if it is a titanium framed beauty. On Thursday evening I got my dull ache behind my second toe on my right foot again; the ominous sign that I was going to get another foot swelling episode, and sure enough on Friday my foot had begun to lump up again. The one silver lining in this episode was that I immediately put my trainers on and instead of spending 4 days in limping hell, the swelling started to abate a lot quicker and it's been a lot less painful. So, two things I have got from this. One, exercise seems to have less to do with this than I thought and two, I can control it to a certain degree. Another small victory in getting my running shoes back on.

OK, so big decision time. It's time to stop paddling. I said at the beginning of the summer that I would try to get to grips with the Ranger and hopefully get to paddle it to Hampton Court and back. I'm not even close and realistically I don't have the talent or perseverance to want to make it work. Allied to that, I just cannot see myself getting back into a boat to do the DW again. Some of my fingers and toes are still slightly numb and I am convinced that sitting on a hard plastic seat for 28 hours has made my foot problem worse. The DW and marathon paddling requires commitment and I am just not prepared to spend another winter doing stupidly late paddles to get the miles in. So today, a young man came down to the Royal and bought my boat off me and I was not sorry to see it go.  Easter will forever hold very special memories. I will never look at a hot cross bun in the same way again and when I wake up on future Easter Sundays I will wish all DW competitors luck, knowing that they are on the last leg of a fabulous journey.  But for me, it's over.  Time to concentrate fully on getting my running legs back and becoming a triathlete again.

Some great memories